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Scratch Forums
Forums is a section of the Scratch website which scratchers may ask others for help, show projects, and more. From the Scratch main page, the forums can be found by clicking "forums" on the top menubar for the website, between "support" and "about" Menu Bar The menu bar for the forums is below the words "Scratch Forums" and has the following options: *Forums Home: This lets a scratcher quickly get to the main index of the forums. *Profile: This lets a scratcher change settings for when they are using the forums (see below). *Search: This lets a scratcher search for any keyword or user in the forums, with multiple choices to narrow the search (see below). Forum Categories When a scratcher enter the Scratch forums, you will find there to be many forum categories. They are grouped as "Scratch", "Scratch in other languages", "Other" and "Archived Forums". Scratch Group The Scratch group as the following 10 forum categories: *Announcements: "Watch here for the latest releases of Scratch, and other announcements". Here you may be able to see many new updates to Scratch and it's website, posted only by Forum admins. These can include new versions of Scratch, surveys (or beta versions), updates/changes to the website, and much more. *New Scratch Members: "This is a forum to welcome new Scratchers to the community. Please post helpful information for new Scratch Members here." Here scratchers may may help new scratchers to the website and the program itself, and answer any questions for them including help with simple topics of "how to do this in Scratch". *Show and Tell: "Tell everyone about your projects and galleries." This forum is used for telling the scratch community all about all of the games and projects and interactive art people have made, and advertise them, without spamming the forum. This forum is also used for gathering scratchers together to form development teams for making scratch projects together collaboratively. *FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions: Here administrators and forum moderators post many questions and answer them, trying to keep scratchers from wasting forum space from asking questions with simple answers. So it is reccomended that when a scratch user is having trouble, he/she should first check the FAQ forum if it is answered there. *All About Scratch: "Questions about Scratch? No question is too basic!" Here scratchers may ask about generally all questions about scratch, from sidescrolling, to the history of scratch, and everything between. When a scratcher does not see an answer or his question in the FAQ forum, he/she will generally ask it here. *Educators: "Discuss how you're using Scratch in education." Here educators such as teachers and organizers from schools and organizations can talk about Scratch, and how they use it in class, or for other uses and resources for teaching scratch. *Advanced Topics: "Talk about technical aspects or advanced features." Here scratchers may talk about complex features of the scratch program and how to use it in special ways, such as sidescrolling, lists/arrays, and more. Generally the most advanced questions scratchers ask go here. *Suggestions: "Ideas for the next version of Scratch or improvements to the Website? Post here." Here scratchers may tell ideas for how to improve Scratch and its website, to make it easier, or to have more functions to be able to do more things for projects. These may include new blocks, or improvements to what a block may do. *Troubleshooting: "Problems with Scratch? Think you've found a bug? Post here." Here scratchers may tell about glitches and bugs of the Scratch program or website. For the website, this may include gramatical errors, or the project including glitches only online. This may occur because of lag, and the online Java player. In the scratch program offline, this may be blocks malfunctioning together, or being unable to upload or download projects. *Suggestions: "Topics relating to Scratch Boards, PicoBoards, and Scratch sensing and responding to things happening in the world around it." This forum is for scratchers to talk about the Scratch Sensor Boards and Picoboards, and how they use it in games, and improvements it may have. Note: The Announcements and FAQ forum are not available for members to create topics, and the Announcements forum is not available for Moderators to create topics. Scratch in other languages Because scratch is used all around the world, the Scratch development team has created forums for seperate languages other than English. The forum categories it includes are: *German *Spanish *French *Italian *Chinese *Greek *Korean *Portuguese *Norwegian *Netherlands *Turkish *Translating Scratch: "Come here to discuss translation of the Scratch interface, website, and resources materials. Please discuss in English if possible, so we can better help you with translations." This forum is used to help with translating website and Scratch forum features into other languages. *Other languages: "Use this forum if your language is not yet listed. After a language gets certain support it will get upgraded to a forum of its own." This forum is used for languages that don't yet have its own forum. Note: If scratchers post topics in the forums not in the correct language, their messages may be deleted. Other and Archived Forums The last two groups of the Scratch Forums are "Other" and "Archived Forums". In "Other", there are the following forums: *Inspiration and more: "Ideas and discussions inspired by Scratch or that could inspire future projects. Use this forum if you are not certain if the topic is directly related to Scratch." This forum is generally used for talking about topics not related to scratch, such as videogames and more. *Text-based games: "Also known as Forum Games. This is an experimental category intended to contain this kind of threads to a particular section." This forum category includes forum games. Forum games include drawing ASCII art, playing "Count to 50 before a Mod posts", and wordgames that revolve on saying something based on what the person on the previous post said. There are also the "Archived Forums". This forum generally talks about Scratch Events in real life: *Scratch Day 2009: "Ask questions and share ideas about Scratch Day." This forum topic is used to talk about Scratch Day 2009 and what the people will be doing in different places. *Scratch @ MIT Conference 2008: "Talk about the conference." This forum topic was used to talk about the Scratch Confrence at MIT and what the people will do and show there. Though now as this happened long ago, this forum is not used as much anymore. It is most likely that when a Scratch event comes out in later years (such as a Scratch Day 2010) it will be added to the Archived forums. Profile While on the forums, a scratcher can also click "Profile" on the menubar to access options about viewing the forums. Note: At the end of the list of each category, the scratcher can click "Submit" to save the changes you have made. Essentials Within the Essentials category (which can be found on the left above "Personality"), there are the following general settings: *E-mail: A scratcher can enter their e-mail adress here. The scratcher can change what the e-mail adress can be used for under "Privacy". *Time-zone: A scratcher can enter their timezone here, making the time shown of when forum topics were made more accurate. Personality Within the Personality category (which can be found on the left below "Essentials" and above "Display"), a scratcher can change their signature. A signature is generally a short message, or picture, or link to a project or anything the scratcher wants, to be said under each post the scratcher makes (the post and the signature will be seperated by a line of underscores). Note that the only limits are, that the scratcher must have atleast 50 posts to show the signature under their post (to prevent spammers), and the scratcher must make sure that the signature takes up less than 2 lines (unless the scratcher is using pictures). Display Within the Display category (which can be found on the left below "Personality" and above "Privacy"), there are the following settings: *Visual Style: A scratcher can change what type of visual style to use on the forums (scratchr or scratchrold), though this doesn't appear to change anything *Viewing posts: A scratcher can change the following options to make a page load faster (yes or no): show smileys as graphical icons, show user signatures, show images in user signatures, and show images on posts. *Pagination: A scratcher can change how many topics or posts to see per page. Privacy (under work) E-mail Digests (under work)